By Richard Abott
Defense Daily
The U.S. should speed up efforts to develop new nuclear-capable weapons, including a “cost-effective, credible” replacement for the Trident II ballistic missile, the Chief of Naval Operations said this week.
In a talk at the Mitchell Institute Tuesday in Washington, Adm. John Richardson also called for exploring capabilities such as low-yield nuclear weapons to counter new asymmetric threats.
“We need new programs. We need to move capability into the fleet faster. Our inability to do that, despite what we might describe as a good old college try, is going to be a strategic Achilles’ heel,” Richardson said. “We need to restore our technical agility, our ability to move technology into our people’s hands faster.”
Richardson said such capabilities include the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead being developed this year for the Navy by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The nuclear weapon would tip the Navy’s Trident II D-5 missiles.
“That tries to address some of these asymmetries that have emerged since we last really did some research on this,” Richardson said.
Richardson also reiterated the importance of maintaining the Trident II with a “serious life-extension program” that would update the missile’s subsystems and recapitalize its launchers.
The Democrat-controlled House and the Republican-led Senate are at loggerheads over the W76-2, which House lawmakers want to bar funding the Navy from deploying. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the House Armed Services Committee chair, has said it would be a “destabilizing move to put these [W76-2 warheads] on submarines.”
The Senate, meanwhile, supports W76-2. In the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act the upper chamber passed last week, senators approved handing the weapon over to the Navy beginning in September, as scheduled.
This story first appeared in Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.
